Car Dock

IBM is the scavanger in this situation.

Leaving aside the fact how differently Sun treated contributors that had licensed some of the code of OpenOffice (IBM for instance) to others that used only the free version (Suse, Redhat, Canonical), how it would come in and changing importance of bug reports according to which company had submitted it or was affected by it. I dare say that IBM is the coyote here... feeding on a dead animal left by something else.

After Oracle left OpenOffice for dead after it aquired its owner and basically wouldn't give a frak about what was left of it in the wake of the wave of fleeing developers, guess who urged Oracle to donate the code to Apache? If you guessed IBM, have a cookie. Why would IBM want the code given to Apache? Well if you think they want it out of the hands of a apathic Oracle and into the hands of someone that might do something to it you might be partially right... but that's far prom the real reason. You see if they wanted that, they could just contribute to The Document Foundation.

Now, what's the biggest difference between LibreOffice and OpenOffice, leaving their names and document icons aside. If you thought the license you now get a cupcake. What does the permisive Apache License let you do (to some extent) that the GPL does not? Come on, you all know this. it's the same reason why Google has Android under an Apache-like license and the reason they have so far held back the source of Android 3.0+ Have a muffin if you thought that using an Apache license may allow you to have some/all of the code spun off into a separate proprietary project. Guess who is the largest corporate user of OpenOffice code after Sun/Oracle... Why yes, it is Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (or the Big Blue as they like to be called now), if you were thinking of them have a donut. IBM would benefit form an Apache sponsored project with a permissive license and that's the reason that they put their Lotus code that they are giving Apache under the same license. It is so that they can make use of it all in a cohesive manner.

I'm definitely not criticising their behaviour, they are geniuses, evil geniuses mind you, but geniuses non the less. Oracle is absolutely aware of this move but don't really care. Be sure that Apache knows some of this already although they might not admit it yet (not even to themselves) but their excuse is that they can't really allow themselves to treat any new incubator project differently.

The biggest irony of all of this is that LibreOffice could take some improvements made by OpenOffice because OpenOffice's license alows it, but IBM can't use virtually any LibreOffice code because it would make their own license less permisive so they would have to write a whole lot of code themselves.